“Encryption is inexorably tied to our national interests. It is a safeguard for our personal secrets and economic prosperity. It helps to prevent crime and protect national security." – A report from the bipartisan House Judiciary Committee & House Energy and Commerce Committee

Author: Dick Eastman

“As Congress scrambles to agree on a spending bill, a dangerous piece of legislation that would redefine how law enforcement collects data is being snuck in at the last minute. Through convoluted provisions, the CLOUD Act would give the Executive Branch broad power in deciding how data is exchanged between countries and could severely compromise Americans’ privacy.”

Your secrets may be well known to Cambridge Analytica. The firm helped Donald Trump’s presidential campaign by selling your personal information to the campaign and has now been suspended from Facebook.

Facebook wrote in a statement on March 16, 2018 that it was “Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook.” Cambridge Analytica uses “psychographic” data, meaning it uses data points culled from the internet to create personality profiles of people to use for targeted purposes, such as in an election. The Facebook statement was signed by Paul Grewal, VP & Deputy General Counsel.

The company’s website says that “CA Political will equip you with the data and insights necessary to drive your voters to the polls and win your campaign. We offer a proven combination of predictive analytics, behavioral sciences, and data-driven ad tech.”

I have written before about encrypted email provider Proton Mail. In fact, I used Proton Mail last week when I was in China as it was the only email service I could find that was not blocked by the Great Firewall of China. (I bet that changes soon!) Now the government of Turkey isn’t allowing its citizens access to the privacy-enabled email service.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. PayPal just released a list of over 600 companies the company shares customer data with. I suspect that is a rather typical number. Other online companies probably share your personal data with even more companies than PayPal’s number.

Graphite is the first truly decentralized and encrypted replacement for Google G-Suite and Microsoft Office. Nick Douglas writes in the LifeHacker web site:

“My favourite thing about Graphite, the new blockchain-based Google Docs competitor, is that it’s so much faster. Docs used to be the lightweight alternative to MS Word; now it feels similarly slow and bloated. While I still use it for collaborative work, I’ve been leaning toward Apple’s Notes app in all my solo writing; it’s much faster but has some stupid design choices, such as a bad default font and bright yellow link text. (My second favourite thing about Graphite is that it looks crisp and handsome.)

“Graphite is a web app for documents, spreadsheets, and an email alternative called “conversations”. Its creator Justin Hunter emphasises its security and privacy features: Graphite can store your documents on your own servers or on Blockstack, a recently released decentralised network that uses the blockchain to securely distribute encrypted data. As Hunter explains on Product Hunt, your data is encrypted on your computer before it’s sent to any servers. And unlike Google, Graphite never knows your password.”

Do you own an iPhone? If so, you have lost some of your privacy. Writing in Forbes, Thomas Fox-Brewster reports that:

“In what appears to be a major breakthrough for law enforcement, and a possible privacy problem for Apple customers, a major U.S. government contractor claims to have found a way to unlock pretty much every iPhone on the market.

“Cellebrite, a Petah Tikva, Israel-based vendor that’s become the U.S. government’s company of choice when it comes to unlocking mobile devices, is this month telling customers its engineers currently have the ability to get around the security of devices running iOS 11. That includes the iPhone X…”

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